Collaborative capital and knotworking in third spaces

In 2005, Yrjö Engeström wrote that ‘employees’ collective capacity to create organizational transformations and innovations is becoming a crucially important asset that gives a new, dynamic content to notions of social and collaborative capital’ (p. 308). Just under two decades later, the global higher education sector has experienced an inordinate number of changes and challenges, including the global pandemic, another financial crisis and accelerated advancement of technology. These and many other transformations notwithstanding, and, perhaps, because of these transformations, higher education professionals continue to draw on the power of social connections and collaborative capital. These connections assist us individually and collectively to work through many university restructures and at times of prolonged uncertainties, while we continue participating in transformations and creating a new future of work in higher education.

My book, Optimising the third space in higher education: Case studies of intercultural and cross-boundary collaboration (2022), which presented my research findings about university third space collaborations, drew on the body of Celia Whitchurch’s seminal work published between 2008 and 2018. It also continued the research tradition showcased in an excellent collection of researcher-practitioner insights of the university third spaces and integrated professional identities (McIntosh & Nutt, 2022). I applied spatial – third space – lens to explore the diversity of professional and academic staff interactions in the sociocultural contexts of two regional Australian university campuses, in Australia and Singapore. Staff in the explored institutional projects worked together across multiple boundaries. Projects ranged from university-wide projects related to academic research and researcher visibility enhancement, to small projects about research innovation that led to commercialisation of a research solution, to a large-scale project of mobilisation of medical professional education, among others. I discussed how knowledge and perspectives of professional staff continued to be marginalised and overlooked even when a project required mobilisation of expertise and experiences of all university actors to achieve the goal. It became evident that once traditional staff dichotomies (e.g., professional and academic; or organisational centre and periphery; or campus culture in Australia and in Singapore) retreated, and when diversity of staff and their unique contributions were prioritised, the projects achieved their transformational (i.e., for people and organisation alike) capacity. People who worked on those projects reported that their professional identities were challenged and significantly reshaped in the course of cross-boundary work. They also reported that, despite experiencing many challenges and interpersonal and organisational tensions, they felt an increased satisfaction from working together across boundaries. They felt that their contributions were recognised (which was particularly important for professional staff), their expertise was valued, and their professional selfhoods and work mattered.

At the end of each of five case studies, I posed a list of provocations and questions for further reflection for us, researchers, practitioners, and leaders in our respective higher education spaces, to consider for future practice and to help us agitate for the institutional policy changes needed to recognise all staff efforts in third spaces and in cross-boundary collaborations. Two of these questions continue to challenge my mind now, as I transitioned from professional to academic work and practice in my university:

• What is your idea of a strongly connected and collaborative working environment?

• If organisational structure were an answer to people's increased connectedness, what structure would you envisage as being conducive to increased collaborations, improved communications, and enhanced access to staff collaborative networks? (Veles, 2022)

These two questions are among many of which this blog community members have been contemplating. Sarah Beltrame and Penny Wheeler posed two related and critical questions ‘What can we do if we are restructured out of relationships? What can third space workers learn from other organisational structures and their relationship with others in the university?’

I think about tensions and challenges of collaborative relationships in continuously reorganised/rationalised university “lifeworlds” which many of us inhabit. I ponder on possible and practical solutions for what Sarah and Penny call ‘authentic inclusion’ of all university actors in increasingly integrated university activities, which goes beyond the documentary representation.  I add my voice to Fiona Denney’s explicit imperative of building more permeable boundaries in our organisations and capturing many unique experiences and using the super-powers of integrated professionals as potential solutions to these challenges.

As I continue to reflect on the value of my own integrated professionalism in my recently restructured and rewired university, I recall how my third space identity was forged through years of integrated practice in leading professional staff, supporting the work of the College academics and the Dean, while completing my PhD part-time, integrating casual lecturing and course coordination, and working on a new research project on the weekends. My third space identity encompasses a gradually developed legitimacy within and beyond my immediate university community and my acute awareness and knowledge of the whole-of-university and higher education sector environment. This identity not only prepared me for my career transition, it also provided me with agency and intentionality to navigate new and fractured spaces of previously flourishing interactions and contribute to the project of charting a new organisational map. It sustains me in my daily practice of perspective-taking and -making as we collectively rebuild the university and develop new social connections either through informal knotworking (Engeström, 2008) or deliberate collaborations. I perceive my identity not as a particular type of identity (professional or academic), but rather as identity plasticity, which helps me to work collegially and collectively towards establishing a new and improved collaborative capital.

Postscript

Natalia and her colleagues have just published a strategic literature review on third space working (Veles, Graham & Ovaska, 2023) please visit: https://doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2023.2193826

References

Engeström, Y. (2008). From teams to knots: Activity-theoretical studies of collaboration and learning at work. Cambridge University Press.

Engeström, Y. (2005). Knotworking to create collaborative intentionality capital in fluid organizational fields. In M. M. Beyerlein, S. T. Beyerlein, & F. A. Kennedy (Eds.), Collaborative capital: Creating intangible value (pp. 307–336). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1572-0977(05)11011-5

McIntosh, E. & Nutt, D. (Eds.) (2022). The impact of the integrated practitioner in higher education: Studies in third space professionalism. Routledge.

Veles, N. (2022). Optimising the third space in higher education: Case studies of intercultural and cross-boundary collaboration (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003259527

Whitchurch, C. (2012). Reconstructing identities in higher education: The rise of “Third space” professionals. Taylor and Francis.